Virtual reality/Artificial intelligence ICOs: reviews

While BTC is skyrocketing, and you are waiting half of the day for your transaction to be verified, I advise looking elsewhere – to virtual reality/artificial reality/artificial intelligence (VR/AR/AI) ICOs.

Virtual Reality (VR) and AR (Artificial Reality) has been in the space for already 4-5 years. You do remember Oculus Rift and revolutionary opportunities it presented. Then all industry players started to come into this market with their solutions and enabled devices. The only thing that was missing was the content. Similar situation when iPhone came along. It took 2-3 years to conquer the market as it introduced touchscreen usable tech, but was lacking content. Content came after 3-4 years when content creators have spent enough resources and time in creating usable applications. Same situation we have now with VR: great product, but the content is only coming now due to lack of developers, investments, and proper products.

VR is estimated to have a market of USD 150 billion in 2022. Initial ideas emerge now on how to monetize the market for producers. Selling hardware is one, but as iPhone /Android taught us, the big money is not in the hardware, but in the content. Here we have a few ICOs coming to “help” us see the opportunities.

In this article will look into the following token sales:

GazeCoin vs Spectit

Neuromation

Playkey (briefly)

GazeCoin vs Spectit

Currently, I am focused on two VR/AR providers – GazeCoin and Spectit. My favorite is GazeCoin for multiple reasons. Gaze Coin is a patent-registered blockchain platform measured by gaze control/eye tracking. It enables VR/AR for advertising, copyright tracking and user rewards, which will solve the problem of monetizing VR/AR. Here are the sources:

The Gazecoin already has an existing and functioning platform. So that is the first huge plus. This is not just a whitepaper and future dreams of ponies and rainbow farting kitties!

Secondly, it creates a clear model for advertising in VR/AR environment. Ad content providers pay to the platform for only the time the user looks at the content, and this can be measured. You, as a user, pay only for the time you spend in specific rooms of created reality. For example, you go to DJ room ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUWctQFdERA ), or other created room and pay for the time you spend it there.

This application will be for sure be used for use of adult content. The team, advisers, and the dream channel has been looking in this direction for the last few years and have already created some products/ VR themes on it. I am therefore not surprised that they picked up Amsterdam as their VR city.

Having proper hard cap (predetermined issuance limit) is another indicator that the company has done a proper evaluation of their capabilities. They are missing the hype in the ecosystem, but I see this more as a long-term opportunity. It should not pump and crash in the first days as a coin. I did not find any marketing or salespersons. I think it could be crucial to the success of this platform. Additionally, they are signing contracts with multiple entertainment companies but it is unconfirmed news for now.

Additionally, they took advisor Jeremy Lam from OmiseGo, who will help them implement proper plasma solution on Ethereum network.

Now on to the competitor. There is a similar and more marketed ICO called Spectit. However, analyzing this ICO/company I could not find any hard cap for their tokens. This means that there is no limit on how much tokens is to be launched into the ecosystem. This increases the risk of pump and dump. Here are the sources:

I will not go into details here, but from all I read, I see similar marketing plot. If you invest early, f.x. today – you will get 60% plus bonus tokens. The first day it shows on exchanges you just dump it. Very risky! Thus I leave the tech stuff aside.

Neuromation

Neuromation idea is to have a token for AI ecosystem they are building. The Neuromation platform will provide an exchange and an ecosystem where participants can either contribute or purchase the components of an AI model. The buy/sell in this ecosystem is generated data (10k units), model training, data labeling, data sets sales and model sales. The NeuroToken (NKT) would also provide the capability to buy whole data generator, whatever it means. Here are the sources:

This startup does not have a dedicated Financial Officer. This is a red flag for me if the company’s business model requires someone dedicated to work with finance, accounting and also have a proper understanding how business is made.

The project doesn’t solve areal-worldproblem. Sampling of data is not an issue currently in our communities. We do not have a centralized monster who holds all the sampling data, AI models, etc. I do not see this problem becoming astronomical as there are many governments and privately funded initiatives to make AI models, sample data, etc. Additionally, even Google released its code for their AI.

The customers I assume would be companies, not private individuals. Companies have accounting books. I would like to see how they interpret NKT token in payables and receivables. My guess, they would just use cash, credit payments, which makes this NKT token unusable.

If the team quits, the company collapses. Wherewill you be able to use NKT token then? It is short usability cycle.

Sadly, when doing the research about this token I could not find any community around it or research facilities like universities, institutes cooperating with them. As this AI, which highly scientifical field, I would believe these two components are needed.

My advice for the company is to go to a venture capitalist. I liked the idea, but it does not need a token.

Playkey

Off topic, good luck to all investors or speculators who have bought PlayKey tokens. With discounts of 50% on telegram channel, I only see huge dump when the tokens go to the exchanges. Having valuation for their token of more than USD 150 mln – ya, good luck 🙂

To sum up…

Having spent some time looking into AI/VR/AR universe, the only viable investment I found for myself is the Gazecoin. The ICO is live today and I have some ETH ready for it.